Real-Time (RT) systems are, in the temporal sense, predictable. They're not necessarily fast, though many are; they don't necessarily deal with high throughput, though many do. Their defining characteristic is their temporal predictability. They run glamorous, high-risk, high-speed app...

Many of you have been developing EJB applications since the 1.0 version of the specification. In the EJB 1.1 specification the approach toward EJB exception handling has changed slightly regarding the exceptions and transaction management responsibilities between bean providers and con...

It wasn't long ago that many developers didn't know what an application server did. These days it's become part of our common vocabulary. The main reason for this shift has been the rapid growth in the importance of the Internet as a platform for business applications. Without applicat...

The buzz at JavaOne 2000, in my opinion, was definitely the solidification of Java in the wireless market. As radio host for SYS-CON Radio at JavaOne, I had the pleasure of interviewing CEOs and CTOs of leading application server vendors. Many of them focused, not on J2EE support, but...

Separating presentation and logic when building server-side Web-based applications allows you to generate Web pages with dynamic content easier and faster. It also enables Web designers who aren't especially experienced in application development to easily change the appearance of a W...

The Internet originally interconnected a small number of computers at universities and research labs. It was used to share resources and to send e-mail - an incidental application that over time grew into one of the major uses of the network. Everyone knew everyone else, and security w...

I'd like this month to offer some editorial thoughts on the e-commerce market for EJB solutions - but first let me just say 'Happy Birthday' to the EJB Home column and briefly recap the articles that have appeared here over the past year.…

Persistence Software, Inc., recently released the latest version of its EJB server, PowerTier 6. It's a little different from your run-of-the-mill EJB servers, though. This JavaOne 2000 special-edition issue of EJB Home will enlighten you about PowerPage, a hot feature that will put Po...

Developing distributed applications, in contrast to developing traditional single-process applications, requires a completely different level of monitoring and diagnostic support. In this article I'll discuss how to monitor and diagnose distributed applications based on the CORBA stand...

Discussion groups have recently been abuzz with talk of "coarse-grained entity beans" - a slight misnomer deriving, I suspect, from the addition of mandatory entity beans in EJB 1.1. This month I'll examine the finer points of the Enterprise JavaBeans specification regarding ...

As much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft was a pioneer in server-side component architectures. Its COM/DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) server-side component model for building and deploying components in the Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) environment already had applicati...

Many three-tier applications built using various middleware products ultimately fail in production due to a lack of scalability, flexibility or reliability. This can trigger a need to migrate an application from one middleware product to another. In this article we'll discuss a process...

We've all heard about the great benefits of distributed computing, especially in the areas of scalability and performance. With Java, implementing a distributed solution has never been easier or more practical. We're given three distributed object options that work quite naturally with...

When I started working with Java, I mentioned my move to a colleague of mine, a Microsoft devotee. He wasn't willing to move to the Java platform until supporting integrated development environments (IDEs) were as powerful and easy to use as Visual Basic. Although at the time nothing ...

The recent issuance of an RFP for "Unreliable Multicast" in CORBA got me thinking about the many network semantics available in a combined CORBA/Java environment. There are at least five already, not counting Unreliable Multicast: Java RMI invocations; CORBA synchronous invoc...

Critically important to the reliability of an application is how software components work together and how resilient they are to change. This article discusses how to perform functional testing on servers in the middle tier of distributed applications. We'll also address key middleware...

I expect great things from Enterprise JavaBeans this year, one of which is dominating the e-business front as the component model of choice for server-side application development. E-business is multifaceted, encompassing e-commerce (monetary transactions over the Internet), business-t...

There's a lot of action going on with Java servlets. The recent public release of Java Servlet Specification v2.2 by Sun Microsystems enhances the functionality of the programming model and the deployment and runtime infrastructure of servlets, which provides for better packaging, secu...

The Enterprise JavaBean specification demonstrates the evolution of distributed objects from middleware to application components. In this article we'll discuss where EJB fits into the distributed object landscape.

Often we think of security as a burden, a time-consuming process that requires us to jump through hoops just to get through a doorway or view a Web page on the company intranet. My first real appreciation for (or frustration with) security came a number of years ago. I was a PowerBuild...

We set out to build a generic framework for creating Java client/server relationships. Our hope was to encapsulate all of the messy details of the relationship, allowing developers writing a client or a server to focus just on their particular application. This would allow our team to ...

CORBA - the Common Object Request Broker Architecture - is an open, vendor-independent standard for software interoperability based on object technology. You've used CORBA even if you haven't heard of it by name:

I was asked to stick my neck out and write on the future of Enterprise JavaBeans in year 2000. Just so you know, I was one credit away from a minor in the classics (you know, Greek mythology, ancient Rome and Egypt). However, since I didn't major in this field, nor even minor in it, do...

The philosophy behind the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) announced at JavaOne in June 1999 is to package the Java 2 platform with a collection of "Enterprise APIs," including Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP), and an application programming model to define a standard plat...

Last month, in EJB Home, I covered the business advantage of Enterprise JavaBeans' portability from a high level. First I discussed the various types of portability. Then I covered (1) the portability goals the creators of EJB had in mind when developing the specification and (2) how y...

Congratulations! You've just been designated the project manager of your first CORBA project! "Help!" you say? Even though you may not have any CORBA experience at all, you needn't panic. This article describes how you can grab this bull by the horns and guide your project to...

Today's universities are recognizing the desirability of providing many staff functions for their students through a Web interface. Self-service applications allow students to enroll in courses, manage their personal information and examine their class schedules -and save the universit...

What's all this hype about portability? Portability has been a hot topic since Java's arrival just a few years ago, so I'm going to devote some space toward understanding portability issues centered around the Enterprise JavaBeans architecture and development. This month I'll discuss t...

The next release of the CORBA specification will be a major one, CORBA 3.0. The last time the major release number was incremented - to CORBA 2.0 - it signified the standardization of interoperability. What's new and different enough in this version for OMG to increment the major relea...

Every now and then the computer industry gets swept up in a wave of enthusiasm for some new silver bullet that's apparently going to solve everyone's problems overnight. Actually, these days the wild surges of millennial euphoria seem to come at annual intervals. Usually the technology...

To those of you familiar with Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), deployment descriptors are nothing new. Essentially, a deployment descriptor's purpose is to collect declarative information that can be modified during deployment of an enterprise bean. Deployment descriptors are a key element ...

As I sit down to write this article, the hype for Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace is even greater than the Java industry hype before the release of the Enterprise JavaBeans specification 1.0! I couldn't help including a few references of my own to the beloved trilogy in hopes o...

What Is RMI? RMI, the acronym for Remote Method Invocation, is part of the core Java API. The central idea behind this technology is the ability to call the methods of a remote object, shielding the programmer from mundane Socket handling while promoting a cleaner software architecture...

Developers and managers often think of enterprise applications as insurmountable mountain peaks that only experts can climb. Much like mountain climbing, building a large-scale, enterprise-wide system is a daunting task, not for the faint of heart!

Distributed object computing in Java has become increasingly popular as more complex products are written using a multi-tier architecture. A number of products and protocols are available for facilitating communication, and many developers have trouble deciding which ones to use in a g...

Java Servlets provide a number of significant benefits to Web and application servers everywhere: The ability to write a server-side application that can run without regard to the hardware, server operating system or Web server A dramatic performance boost over CGI or interpreted scrip...

Currently hard at work, the Object Management Group (OMG) is preparing for a preproduction release of the CORBA 3.0 specification before year-end. Such a release will give CORBA ORB vendors an opportunity to implement new CORBA services and identify potential problems before the final ...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.